Due to various exigencies, my desktop got loaned out. In other words a friend’s gaming rig died, he needed something with lots of horsepower, and didn’t have the cash to buy a replacement. So he got my desktop as a loaner.
Word is out that Ubuntu is removing all the Mono applications from Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin.
To start off I’d like to make a sad announcement. Sam, my Beagle Dog, the handsome little guy who I’m holding in the picture above, who I’ve referred to as my “Editor in Chief” (he sat beside me when I wrote every article for the last four years) died in June. He was chasing a rabbit, and it cut across a road. Sam didn’t look.
He is greatly missed by the family, and by his pack mate Rose..
When I originally started writing this article, Miguel de Icaza was in a difficult situation. The situation has now been addressed. On his blog yesterday Miguel announced that there is now a Novell/Xamarin Partnership around Mono.
Mono, the Open Source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET programming environment (the Common Language Infrastructure) , has probably caused more page views, than any other programming environment. Ever.
There’s a variety of issues people have had with Mono, but almost everyone has missed the main point.
Continue reading “The Death Of Mono Or How To Annoy Thousands With Four Words”
Gotta love Twitter. It’s one of the greatest communication tools invented to date. Indenti.ca is even better, while being compatible. But to cover everything, you have to use both.
So someone I’ve never heard of pops up on Indenti.ca, and proceeds to tell me that I’m an idiot.
Sean Michael Kerner at Linux Planet has published an article titled Novell Moonlight 2.0 Gets Microsoft’s Blessing. Now I don’t know what he was thinking when he wrote this article – but I get the impression that he thinks that there’s something important about Microsoft and Novell extending “Patent Protection” to all users of Moonlight, Novell’s Silverlight clone.
He would be far better off to ask “Who cares?”
Really. The only major website using Silverlight/Moonlight is Microsoft.com, and Linux users have no need to go there anyway. They already have reliable, well patched systems.
Besides, HTML5 makes Silverlight and Flash obsolete. Youtube has already implemented HTML5 Video. Not all browsers fully support it yet, but they all will.
I wonder how much money Microsoft and Novell have wasted on Silverlight/Moonlight?
Here’s an interesting concept. Mary-Jo Foley reports that Novell has released a Visual Studio add-on so that .NET developers can target Linux and Macs.
This raises several issues:
1) Are there really any .NET developers out there? No, I’m serious. I did a survey a while back on a couple of websites where developers hang out as to what people are using, and .NET was way down the list. I’d have to dig to find the numbers, but less than 1% of the developers who answered the survey were using .NET.
2) Do MAC users need Mono? There’s a huge range of MAC applications available already. Mono on the Mac seems like a non-starter.
3) Novell has also come up with an IPhone dev kit for Mono. They seem to be ignoring the huge number of apps available for the IPhone written in C. Does anyone really need Mono on the IPhone?
I think I know what Novell is doing. Novell is targeting the Enterprise, providing a single, unified environment that can be used for Windows, IPhone, OSX, and Linux. Corporate Applications are a lucrative market. There are far more programmers working on internal corporate software than for the major software companies. And it’s corporate programmers who use Visual Studio and program .NET applications.
This could be a success for Novell. It’s definitely a market that is willing to pay for results, and if Novell can deliver the results, the money will roll in. Could it make Novell profitable? Maybe.
How many companies run a mix of operating systems that would require a cross platform development environment? The IPhone has made some inroads into the corporate market, but is a distant second to Rim’s Blackberry devices. If Novell was to add BlackBerry OS capabilities, this would be a real seller. Linux hasn’t done well on the desktop, and while it does well in the server room, most .NET applications are designed for the desktop. Corporations who use OSX tend to do so exclusively, and wouldn’t employ Visual Studio anyway.
Without the capability to produce applications for the Blackberry OS, I can’t see this as bring Novell in enough revenues to stop the slid. And that has to be a concern for any corporate types looking at this as a solution. Buying from a vendor who has financial problems introduces a level of uncertainty that Corporate IT doesn’t like.
Lefty said…
By the way, I’m attempting to understand this:
“It doesn’t matter whether Mono is any good. It doesn’t matter whether or not Mono is legal. It doesn’t matter whether or not Mono is a patent trap. What matters is that three years ago, Windows XP fucked up. Again.”
Are you saying that, because you has a problem with Windows three years ago, no one should use Mono on Linux systems…?
October 21, 2009 6:58 PM
Lefty,
What do the following products have in common?
1976 Ford Explorer Pickup truck.
1978 Harley Davidson
1980 Hyster S40E Forklift
1980 Commodore VIC20
1984 Apple Macintosh
Just heard a new name for the Boycott-BoycottNovell crowd:
Miguel’s Mono Minions
It was late at night when I got this, and the meds had kicked in (for those who don’t know, I’m in constant pain, and I’m pretty stoned at times) so my mind translated it to
Miguel’s Monocephalic Minions
After I stopped laughing (laughing is good – it makes the pain go away) I corrected it. Still, Miguel’s Mono Minions – has a bit of a ring to it.
Through the Looking Glass 
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